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Recent articles I’ve read point toward a typical confusion about authoritarianism, what it is and what causes it. The confusion seems built into the way we frame and measure authoritarianism, in particular as seen in the earliest research. Some social scientists speak of ideological mindsets and personality traits in the way that race realists talk about races, such that there are ‘authoritarians’ and ‘non-authoritarians’ as clearly defined and demarcated types of people. But it’s beginning to occur to some of them that this is inadequate.

Maybe unintentionally, Amanda Taub gets at this point in her Vox piece, The Rise of American authoritarianism. She states that, “Non-authoritarians who were sufficiently frightened of threats like terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.” This is based on “researchers like Hetherington and Weiler, Stanley Feldman, Karen Stenner, and Elizabeth Suhay, to name just a few.”

It’s interesting research and I’ve read many of the scholarly writings on this and so I’m already familiar with what Taub is discussing, but my understanding of such things has shifted these past years. When we label something, we tend to reify the underlying concepts and forget that they are social constructs we project onto the data (and hence onto the world) in trying to make sense of complexity, which then can lead to increasing simplification as the reified concepts are fed back into further research design and analysis.

The quote above about ‘non-authoritarians’ gets at this. If non-authoritarians can act like authoritarians, then maybe there is no such thing as authoritarians and non-authoritarians. Instead, a more reasonable conclusion is that all people possess within their common humanity a wide variety of potentials for psychological traits, social behaviors, and ideological tendencies. If so, it wouldn’t be helpful then to speak of subsets and subgroups as if that adds further clarity and insight. To be fair, Taub touches upon the issue rather directly, albeit briefly:

“More than that, this early research seemed to assume that a certain subset of people were inherently evil or dangerous — an idea that Hetherington and Weiler say is simplistic and wrong, and that they resist in their work. (They acknowledge the label “authoritarians” doesn’t do much to dispel this, but their efforts to replace it with a less pejorative-sounding term were unsuccessful.)”

Immediately after that, Taub goes right back to the assumption that authoritarianism is an inherent “psychological profile” that can get activated. From this view, seeming non-authoritarians don’t become authoritarian but were secretly authoritarian all along, just waiting for the right conditions to make their true nature manifest. Sleeper agents of societal madness ready to be unleashed on the naively innocent, Manchurian candidates waiting for a trigger from an evolutionary demiurge lurking in human synapses. At any moment, so goes the dark fantasy, alt-right trolls could transform into goosestepping Nazis who will suddenly take over the country. But in reality that isn’t how it ever works, as these things gradually build up over time and involve the entire society. Authoritarianism is far from being a strange relic of abnormal psychology and social deviants, like an infectious Darwinian maladaptation that must be quarantined and studied by the intellectual elite standing above it all. Even if we were to think of it as a mind virus, the greater threat would be those intellectual elites becoming carriers and spreading it into polite society, as has happened throughout history.

Projecting authoritarianism onto individuals or narrow groups is the opposite of helpful. It’s a way for people like Taub to maintain their belief that authoritarianism is something that only involves those other people, not good liberals like herself. Here is the problem. Taub is a Democrat and has strongly supported Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign has shown how strong the authoritarian tendencies are built into the Democratic Party. In supporting corrupt oligarchs like Clinton, Taub demonstrates how easily supposed non-authoritarians can act like authoritarians and defend authoritarianism. It does appear that authoritarianism closely tracks with social conservatism, but social conservatism comes in many forms. Democrats, for example, can be extremely socially conservative in their defense of the status quo, no matter how ‘liberal’-sounding is their empty rhetoric.

The reality is that no individual is an authoritarian. Rather, it’s social systems that are authoritarian, whether we are talking about organizations or movements or parties. In the US, the two-party system has long had an authoritarian streak. Both parties create the conditions for increasing neoliberalism and neoconservatism, increasing inequality and police-surveillance state. And those conditions in turn create an oppressive atmosphere of fear that, for the general public, elicits authoritarianism. It’s a great means of ensuring submission and social control. Social dominance orientation types, such as the lesser evils of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, then attempt to use that to their advantage. If you’re looking for the least authoritarian Americans, you’d need to look entirely outside of the two-party system.

In a fairly authoritarian society such as ours built on a long history of oppression, it is meaningless to talk about ‘authoritarians’ as if they were a distinct group of people. Nor does it help to blame it all on a single issue like racism, as a way of dismissing the larger context of authoritarianism. Obviously, as Taub explains, various forms of bigotry and other factors can elicit and activate authoritarianism. It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to separate out all of the tangled threads of dysfunction.

Let me return to the significance of the racial order. It is true that, as we live in an authoritarian society, we also live in a racist society. Both authoritarianism and racism become internalized by everyone within this society, even if normally these remain hidden. It’s there in the background, shaping and informing our worldview. Research shows that it’s easy to find racial biases in almost anyone, but more than that it is how racism is woven into the social structures and institutions we are part of. Not as much research of this sort has been done on underlying authoritarianism, but it has become more of a focus and it would be expected to operate in a similar way. There is pervasive racism with a rather small minority of overt racists, and so it should be unsurprising that there can be pervasive authoritarianism that is not primarily dependent on the authoritarianism of individuals. The continuation of systemic problems don’t require vocal, active support since silent, passive complicity can be so much more powerful.

This is hard for people to grasp. We can’t see clearly the society we are inseparably a part of, that defines our entire sense of identity and experience of reality. This makes it difficult for researchers who are trying to understand the very problems they are implicated in, as members of the society under scrutiny. Many researchers, as with many journalists like Taub, are good liberals which creates another bias. Obviously, authoritarianism will operate differently among liberals than among conservatives or right-wing reactionaries. Yet we know from history that authoritarians often come to power when good liberals, out of fear, turn to authoritarian leaders. Clinton in calling her enemies deplorables (just like she did when calling young blacks ‘superpredators’) was intentionally provoking an authoritarian response of fear from her followers, framing the other side as an existential threat to the ‘liberal’ way of life… and it worked, even though it turned out that her establishment authoritarianism was less effective as she lacks charisma and raw force of personality.

It’s not hard, though, to understand the likely reasons for authoritarianism manifesting differently throughout the social order. Growing inequality (of wealth and opportunity, of power and influence) inevitably will lead to authoritarianism, but that authoritarianism will be expressed in disparate ways according to demographics and the historical legacies that they represent; lower classes or upper classes; or if middle class, downwardly mobile lower middle class or stable upper middle class; populations with high or low rates of unemployment, food deserts, incarceration, and lead toxicity; those directly impacted or not by the numerous negative externalities of neoliberalism and neoconservatism; et cetera.

The liberal class tends to be relatively more economically secure and comfortable, and so authoritarianism is less often to be seen in overt ways on the personal level. Instead, good liberals will support the authoritarianism of the system that their lifestyle is dependent on. That way, their hands are kept clean. They let the professionals like the Clinton New Democrats do the dirty work of forcing punishment on minorities through racialized tough-on-crime laws, drug wars, and mass incarceration… through corporatism that maintains the class system and keeps the poor in their place… through war-mongering, CIA interventions, and neoliberal foreign policies that ensures the American Empire runs smoothly.

In basic ways, the liberal class even on the lower end of the economic spectrum are protected from what the rest of the country experiences. The greatest of privileges is never having to acknowledge one’s privilege. It is all taken for granted, not just as a privilege but a right — if required, to be protected from the dirty masses that demand to be treated with equality and fairness. When that privilege is challenged, the authoritarianism of good liberals becomes very much overt. It’s just that in recent history good liberals have been kept comfortable and content while the lower classes have been kept disempowered and silenced, but that has begun to change and so we are beginning to hear authoritarian rhetoric from establishment Democrats, in their fear of the coming backlash of righteous justice, outraged vengeance, and populist unrest. Status quo Democrats know that they have been on the wrong side of history and this all-encompassing anxiety has led them to lash out blindly, making them a dangerous animal (e.g., their paranoid conspiracy theorizing and war-mongering about Russia that could initiate World War III).

Sadly, liberals tolerate, help to create, and often defend the very conditions that make authoritarianism inevitable: hyper-partisanship, identity politics, increasing inequality, stagnating wages, weakening organized labor, loss of good job benefits, worsening job insecurity, scapegoating the poor, law and order politics, racist dog whistle rhetoric, war hawk policies, militarization of the police, drug wars, mass incarceration, etc. Major figures such as President Jimmy Carter have voiced concern that the United States has become a banana republic and, based on the overwhelming evidence, it is impossible to argue against those concerns. In Taub’s article, she discusses this as if the conditions of authoritarianism are new, but the reality is that they’ve been building for decades and generations. Democrats have done little if anything to stop this, often promoting policies that make it worse. Both parties have embraced a corporatism that somehow balances the requirements of an oligarchic police state and the demands of plutocratic inverted totalitarianism, all the while maintaining the endless spectacle of a banana republic.

What motivates supposed liberals to promote the policies that undermine liberal-mindedness and strengthen authoritarianism? That isn’t to scapegoat liberals, in opposition to those who would like to scapegoat some other group, but obviously many who sound liberal-like aren’t the enemies of authoritarianism that they pretend to be. This faux liberalism is what one would expect in an authoritarian society born out of classical liberalism. Most people on all sides don’t understand the kind of society they are in or how it shapes them. As with faux liberals, Trump’s followers and his election to the presidency are symptoms, not the disease. No single group can be blamed for what has become of this society. All of it has to be taken as a whole, including the role of good liberals and every other sector of society. It is the society that is authoritarian. In a non-authoritarian society, individual authoritarians would be powerless and insignificant. The source of of the problem is systemic and institutional.

There is no inborn psychological profile of authoritarians, just as I’d argue that there are no genetic-based personality traits of addictiveness, neuroticism, etc. There are simply authoritarian conditions, no different than there are conditions for other mindsets and behaviors. Authoritarianism along with so much else is latent in everyone, as a potential within a shared human nature.

I’ve long been fascinated by personality traits/types and other areas of social science. Myers-Briggs personality theory was what initially drew me toward using web searches to find info. The first website I ever became an active member of was a Myers-Briggs discussion forum, although such things as trait theory was also regularly discussed. Most fascinating of all was the research and the many correlations shown, but over time I’ve grown more circumspect.

These days, I feel less certain about what correlations might (or might not) indicate. It partly comes from years of seeing how research can be misused by race realists, but that is only possible because much of the research itself is problematic. Correlations are dime a dozen, whereas proving causation is often near impossible. It’s not easy to determine that a correlation is not spurious, that it is significant and meaningful, and then articulating a falsifiable hypothesis that leads to useful results that don’t merely confirm one’s biases and expectations.

My interest here goes far beyond only authoritarianism. This involves my growing appreciation for the power of all kinds of environmental influences. Not just influences, though. To be more accurate, we are environmental creatures to the core of our being. We are inseparable from our environments, both physical and social. This has become a major theme of my writing. It comes out in my discussions of race realism and capitalist realism, of rat parks and high inequality, of toxo plasmosis and lead toxicity, WEIRD research and ancient societies.

Authoritarianism is yet another lens through which to peer into the social nature of humans. Living in this society, all of us are products of our environment while also being participants in the social order. What if studying authoritarians holds up a mirror to our own psyche, individual and collective? What does this say about us?

I heard once again someone stating that Democrats start more wars. To give a quick response to that statement, I’d point out that it takes both parties to start a war… and there is a big difference between wars of defense and wars of aggression. But the comment and my response isn’t all that important… or, I should say, not all that interesting to me.The reason for this is because the person was responding to a comment where I didn’t even mention either of the parties. I don’t care to defend the war record of the Democratic Party. I’m an independent liberal, not a Democrat.

“I always wonder why rightwingers love war so much. Looking﻿ past all the patriotic propaganda, destroyed lives is the reality of war. But once the soldiers come home all the lovers of war suddenly stop caring.”

Starting with this as a working hypothesis, I have two purposes for this post. First, I want to clarify what I see as the differences between ‘rightwingers’ and ‘liberals’, both being specific demographics rather than broad categories. Second, I want to determine what the data shows about each demograhic.

– – –

I’ve pointed out many times that (based on the data from Beyond Red vs. Blue) only a 1/3 of Democrats even identify as liberals and almost 1/2 of liberals are Independents. Other sources show:

According to recent surveys by the New York Times and CBS News, between 18% and 27% of American adults identify as liberal, versus moderate or conservative. In the 2008 presidential election, exit polls showed that 22% of the electorate self-identified as “liberal.”

Furthermore, Republicans and Democrats had a major ideological reversal over this past century.

“Prior to 1964, both parties had their liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, each of them influential in both parties… After 1980, the Republicans became a mostly right-wing party… while the Democrats, while keeping their left wing intact… grew a substantial moderate wing in the 1990s in place of their old conservative wing”

So-called far leftwingers such as Obama are more conservative than many past Republicans such as Eisenhower. Heck, Obama is more socially conservative in terms of his actual policies (continuing the War on Drugs, Gitmo, and torture) than many rightwing libertarians. Partisan rhetoric doesn’t mean much to me, but I do consider meaningful the differences between liberal and conservative (as general worldviews, attitudes, and psychological traits).

I’ve written about the correlation, although not equivalence, of conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)… or, to be more specific, about the correlation that at least exists within the population of the United States (to be fair, the correlation may not exist in other countries, especially not in countries that don’t have a rightwing religious tradition). At that post I quoted the following:

It is not that all Republicans are authoritarians; nor that all Democrats are non-authoritarian. Far from it. And people adopt party affiliations for a variety of reasons. But whereas those with the authoritarian cognitive style used to be more evenly split between the parties, decades of appeals for “states rights”, “law and order”, and against ERA, gay rights and immigration reform have concentrated this particular personality type in the GOP. And the consequence of that decades-long process has been the emergence of a Republican party that is, to a remarkable degree, built on viscera — on appeals to anger and resentment, and a deeply-felt conviction that America is breaking down irretrievably and that the way to stop that process is to demonize and marginalize outgroups deemed responsible for that breakdown. And this is no longer a geographically confined phenomenon, but a fully national one.

I’ve also written about recent research showing that conservatives have a predisposition toward violence. For example, here is a description of one study:

The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.

– – –

I’m not sure how strong of conclusions can be based on any of this data, but it caused me to consider two lines of thought.

First, I was wondering if liberals are always in the minority. The challenge is that liberalism never wins in that the goalposts are always shifting. What was liberal in the past just becomes the new conservative. So, the status quo is always in a sense conservative. This can be seen, for example, with conservatives identifying with classical liberalism which is just the liberalism from past centuries turned into an unchanging ideology. Or, as another example, most Americans identify as conservative even though the positions they hold are what liberals have been fighting for since the founding of the United States (US Demographics & Increasing Progressivism).

Another reason for the minority status of liberals is that maybe liberal genetics are newer in human evolution. Satoshi Kanazawa proposed a theory along these lines in order to explain the correlation of liberalism and higher IQ.

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Young adults who identify themselves as “not at all religious” have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as “very religious” have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women’s value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa’s analysis of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well.

So, even though liberals have influence to varying degrees depending on the society, liberalism will likely never be the predominant attitude in any society. My suspicion is that most politicians aren’t on average as liberal as certain other similarly well-educated demographics: artists, writers, journalists, academics, scientists, grassroots activists, et cetera. It seems to me that those with strong liberalism probably wouldn’t be very interested in national public office because mainstream politics is dominated by cronyism and corporatism. The few strong liberals who do get into national politics probably don’t often advance very far in their political careers.

My second line of thought was an extension of my previous blog posts on this topic. What exactly are the real world results of these predispositions? I did some quick research to see if I would come across any new info. A couple items caught my attention.

Here is a paper about right-wing authoritarianism (and social dominance orientation) in the context of the 9/11 attack:

In sum, our study contributes to the understanding of attitudes toward restrictive political measures that were issued in the aftermath of September 11 and thus to the understanding of psychological underpinnings of threats to democracy. Predispositions like RWA, SDO, political ideology, and personal values played a significant role in this matter. Although feelings of threat from terrorism did not automatically lead to stronger endorsement of surveillance measures and restriction of civil liberties, they reinforced the effect of RWA on support for surveillance.

Even more interesting is this detail from other research about moral choices:

They offered some other scenarios too, about collateral damage in military situations, for instance, and found similar differences: Conservatives accepted collateral damage more easily if the dead were Iraqis than if they were Americans, while liberals accepted civilian deaths more readily if the dead were Americans rather than Iraqis.

That is one juicy morsel. A liberal would rather have soldiers on own their side die if it would save innocent civilians… because, afterall, a soldier is trained to fight and die to protect people. A conservative, on the other hand, is more willing to sacrifice people even if innocent just as long as they are seen as ‘other’. This is a profound difference. To the liberal, the conservative is heartless in putting patriotic loyalty over the protection of the innocent. But, to the conservative, the liberal is a traitor in their being more willing to sacrifice soldiers who are courageously protecting us. Liberals tend to empathize with all humans more equally and conservatives tend to have a group mentality of ‘us’ vs ‘them’.

I should, however, point out that the generalization about liberals being against soldiers is unfair and inaccurate.

We see that liberals and progressives are more sympathetic toward animals and foreigners than are conservatives and libertarians. Conversely, though not to the same extent, conservatives are more sympathetic toward soldiers and babies than are progressives and liberals. Criminals, drug addicts, and the homeless are again more “popular” among progressives and liberals than among conservatives and libertarians.

Sympathy here is a relative term. Absolutely speaking, progressives and liberals are very sympathetic towards babies and American soldiers, for example. It is only when sympathy is compared between different groups that significant differences emerge. For very conservative voters, American soldiers are on the top. For progressives, soldiers share fourth place with foreigners.

The implication of this would seem to be that the more liberal someone is the more they’d be reluctant to commit to wars where innocents are unnecessarily endangered. I’d think that, for this reason, liberals would be particularly against wars of aggression such as the US invasion of Iraq. Considering 2/3 of Democrats don’t identify as liberal, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that most Democratic politicians didn’t strongly oppose Bush’s warmongering right after 9/11. If my theory is correct, liberals are always in the minority even within what is considered the liberal Democratic party.

So, when the rightwingers are hot and bothered about some new xenophobic fear, it’s hard for the liberal minority to counter it. This is particularly problematic considering social stress/uncertainty, fearmongering, and violent imagery can even make liberals more open to conservative views and more willing to accept authoritarian policies.

Liberals who gleaned most of their news from television in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks increased their support for expanded police powers, bringing them closer in line with the opinions of conservatives, a study by a UW-Madison researcher shows.

In contrast, heavy newspaper reading by liberals was related to lower levels of support for expanded police powers and for limits on privacy and freedom of information, basically reinforcing the differences between liberals and conservatives, says Dietram Scheufele, a journalism professor who conducted the study.

“TV pushed the two groups together in their thinking about post-9/11 policies, such as the Patriot Act. It made liberals more conservative. It took them away from what they initially believed and pushed them more toward a more conservative law-and-order stance,” Scheufele says.

The study, soon to be published in the journal Mass Communications & Society, is based on a survey of nearly 800 residents of Tompkins County, N.Y., in the fall of 2001, shortly after the attacks. Its results have been validated by two subsequent national surveys.

The survey showed that among liberals who watched little television, about 20 percent favored more government police powers. But about 41 percent of liberals who were heavy viewers of TV news supported such measures – much closer to the 50 to 60 percent of conservatives who supported greater police powers, regardless of how much TV news they watched.

The gap between conservatives and liberals widened, however, among heavy newspaper readers.

About 39 percent of light-reading liberals backed restricting freedom of speech in the days after the attacks, versus 31 percent who were heavy newspaper readers. Among conservatives, about 66 percent favored the limits, and nearly 70 percent of heavy readers backed the restrictions.

“Newspaper reading tended to reinforce partisan leanings, partly because it is more selective, readers have more options and seek out their own viewpoints,” Scheufele says. “By contrast, TV coverage is very linear, doesn’t offer any choice and was more image driven. You saw the plane hitting the building time and time again.”

Still, the difference between liberals and conservatives remains true and relevant. Another aspect of this difference has to do with willingness to compromise and seek bipartisanship. I went into the details of this in another post where I pointed out, for example, that Republicans tend to only show strong support for Republican administrations and yet Democrats tend to show strong support no matter which party is in power. In an article I found, the author theorized the liberal attitude had to do with conflict avoidance… which the author thought most closely correlated to the personality trait of ‘agreeableness’ (a trait that both liberals and libertarians tend to test higher on than do conservatives; this could explain why both liberals and libertarians joined together in protesting against Bush starting the Iraq war):

Perhaps the concept of non-partisanship, conflict avoidance, and compromise is inherently appealing to liberal sensibilities. This can be framed as both a positive or negative trait, as being extremely conflict avoidant could relate to appeasing one’s enemies or being a moral relativist. Some in the press have observedthat “An endorsement of civility and reason is basically an endorsement of Barack Obama. ‘Reason and civility’ are practically the Democratic party’s platform.” Perhaps anyone with the motivation to promote reason and civility in politics would necessarily attract a liberal audience, regardless of how truly non-partisan one intended to be.

What psychological traits might relate to being conflict avoidant? The most obvious trait is Agreeableness, one of the Big Five dimensions of personality, depicted in the below graph ofyourmorals.org data. As you can see, liberals do score slightly higher on measures of Agreeableness, which includes questions like not finding “fault with others” and being “generally trusting”.

The effect size is fairly small though, so it might help to find some convergent evidence. I did find this paper, where a nationally representative sample was asked if people “try to avoid getting into political discussions because they can be unpleasant, whether they enjoy discussing politics even though it sometimes leads to arguments, or whether they are somewhere in between.” There was a small, but significant correlation (r=.07) between being conflict tolerant and being Republican and a smaller, but insignificant correlation (r=.03) between being conflict avoidant and being a Democrat. This paper cites 6 instances where Agreeableness is negatively linked to conservativism, but also 2 instances where it is positively linked. It seems like there may be a link between being agreeable overall and being liberal (again, with both positive and negative connotations), but the link is certainly weaker than other effects (e.g. openness to experience or conscientiousness). Perhaps whatever effect exists due to differences in Agreeableness may be magnified by lower liberal perceptions of ingroup/outgroup distinctions, leading to reduced willingness to engage in conflict with out-groups, as conservatives have heightened concerns about constructs like group loyalty.

This next study connects how all of this relates specifically to being sympathetic to others (outside of one’s focus and, I would add, outside of the focus of one’s self identity or group identity).

In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals’ and conservatives’ reaction to “gaze cues” — a person’s tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person’s eye movements, even if it’s irrelevant to their current task — and found big differences between the two groups.

Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.

Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives’ value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts.

“We thought that political temperament may moderate the magnitude of gaze-cuing effects, but we did not expect conservatives to be completely immune to these cues,” said Michael Dodd, a UNL assistant professor of psychology and the lead author of the study.

Liberals may have followed the “gaze cues,” meanwhile, because they tend to be more responsive to others, the study suggests.

By the way, this would seem to be measuring something similar to traits such as need for closure which has been researched in terms of conservatism (but I’m not sure how strong is the correlation):

Let me return to the study about liberal and conservative view of soldiers and foreigners. Obviously, to want to treat all people equally and fairly (whether a part of one’s group or not) originates from an attitude of conflict avoidance, of ‘agreeableness’, of sympathetic responsivness. Maybe the difference (about how people treat the perceived ‘other’, whether enemy combatants or just innocent civilians) can be seen in the following video about an action the US military took in Afghanistan. The action seems typical of the conservative mindset and the response to the video seems typical of the liberal mindset.

I realize some would point out that we don’t know if anyone was necessarily killed, but then again we don’t know that no one was killed. It isn’t good policy to obliterate villages with bombs without even going into the village to make sure there are no innocent people still there.

Also, put this into context of all the innocent people who have been killed. It’s obvious the US military isn’t actually there to help the people living there. The response to 9/11 is entirely out of proportion. More people have died in our seeking national ‘defense’ and patriotic retribution than were lost on 9/11. Ten years later, we have almost no beneficial result to show for any of it. If anything, there are more terrorists and potential terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq than before we invaded.

I hear the criticisms of all this. The research is biased. Or I’m speculating too much. Or I’m just playing semantic games by separating liberalism from the Democratic Party. Or the fact that most Americans originally supported the wars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear ya. I realize I’m not likely to convince anyone with an opposite opinion (confirmation bias, backfire effect, and the power of misinformation). If you don’t trust any data I have or could share, there ain’t much room for discussion of any kind. Yes, I have a liberal bias which is showing throughout this entire post… from what research interests me to the conclusions I make (I try to be aware of my biases and not get blinded by them, but my success or failure in this regard is for others to decide). I honestly don’t know how to answer criticisms about all of this. I guess just take it or leave it.

Ignoring all that, let me instead consider this issue in light of public opinion (I hope that, even if you don’t trust the opinions of liberals and scientists, you at least trust the opinions of the public). I started this post by pointing out the problems with talking about all of this in a partisan manner. I’m not going to deny that when Bush started the wars many Democrats supported him, that when Bush pushed for the Patriot Act many Democrats patriotically cheered it on… and, of course, that when Obama came into office nothing really changed (or, to put it into the language of Palin, “How’s that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?”). I just don’t care. Fuck the politicians of both parties, a pox on both of their houses. That is my analysis of that issue.

So, public opinion: What does the American people think, specifically what do various demographics think? Is there a clear distinction that can be seen between those on the left and those on the right in terms of support for recent wars?

Public opinion is a good test for the original inquiry considering these wars have very much been a bipartisan effort, but I must point out that even within the limited framework of the two party system there are still major differences to be seen. Even though the Democratic Party may not be a liberal party in the eyes of liberals, many liberals see it as their only option which is why most liberals voted for Obama (liberals want to believe in the rhetoric Democratic politicians spew just as libertarians want to believe in the rhetoric Republican politicians spew). Unfortunately, most polling is done using the categories of Republican and Democrat and I suppose the two parties are rough equivalents to conservative and liberal (in that, even though conservatives exist in both parties, significant numbers of liberals are only found in the Democratic party). Alas, I can’t entirely escape the partisan issue. So, I’ll be forced to rely on polling using partisan labels, but I’ll try to include enough other polling data to clarify the positions of rightwingers and leftwingers.

I’ll start with Afghanistan. The war there was definitely bipartisan and even supported by liberals. Those who attacked on 9/11 were located in Afghanistan, although most of them originated from Saudi Arabia. If it was a partisan issue, it would be expected that mostly Republicans supported the war during the Bush administration and mostly Democrats supported the war when Obama took over… but that isn’t what the data shows.

Support for President Barack Obama’s policy in Afghanistan turns the political landscape upside down. Democrats say 62 – 33 percent the United States should not be there, even though they strongly support President Obama heavily on virtually all other issues. Republicans, who oppose Obama on most issues, back the war 64 – 31 percent. Independent voters say 54 – 40 percent the United States should not be in Afghanistan.

It’s in fact the opposite of what partisan politics would predict. So, Republicans are bipartisan in their support of the Afghanistan War.

So, what about the Iraq War? There was moral and rational justification for the Afghanistan War, but there was no moral or rational justification for the Iraq War. The Iraq War is the very definition of a war of aggression (which is an illegal war and doesn’t meet the standards of a just war).

The political polarization regarding support for the Iraq War has been unprecedented. Recent polls by Gallup and others show that a majority of Republicans now support the war (about 70 percent, on average, versus 25 percent opposed), while an even larger majority of Democrats oppose it (about 15 percent supporting versus 80 percent opposed). At the start of the war, the partisan divide was not as great as it is today: According to a poll taken by Gallup in July 2003, Republicans overwhelmingly favored the United States’s sending troops to Iraq (by 88 percent to 12 percent), while Democrats were evenly divided (49 percent to 49 percent). But one year later, Gallup found, the public had become sharply polarized, as Democrats’ opposition to the war (82 percent versus 16 percent support) reached the exact opposite level of Republicans’ support (82 percent versus 16 percent opposed).

It’s a sad fact that many people believed the lies told by the Bush administration. The public, the media, and the politicians are all to be blamed for not strongly questioning those lies, but it should be pointed out that the two groups that did question the most were the libertarians and liberals. It also should be pointed out that it was mostly Republicans who chose to continue to believe those lies long after they were proven to be intentional misinformation.

Looking at these opinions in historic context, Gallup’s mid-2007 average finding of nearly three-fifths of the public saying the Iraq War was a mistake was somewhat more negative than the highest negative reading the organization obtained during the Korean War, when about half (51 percent) called it a mistake in February-March, 1952, but it was slightly less negative than the worst reading recorded during the Vietnam war in May 1971 (61 percent).

In neither of those conflicts, however, was the public polarized politically to the extent it is today. During the Vietnam War there was little difference by party affiliation on Gallup’s mistake question. And while the Republican/Democrat divide reached seventeen percentage points at the height of public opposition to the Korean War in 1952, when 61 percent of Republicans versus 44 percent of Democrats called it a mistake, this was hardly a third of the current fifty-five-percentage-point partisan divide over Iraq reported in the fall of 2005, when 80 percent of Democrats versus 25 percent of Republicans said the war was mistake.

In contrast to their views on Iraq, most Americans continue to support “sending military forces to Afghanistan” and are far less polarized over it. In August 2007 70 percent of the public told Gallup that sending troops to Afghanistan was not a mistake, with 88 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of Democrats concurring.

Let me clarify a confusion in the above quote. Pundits and politicians may be more polarized now than in the past, but the general public isn’t necessarily more polarized. The public has consensus on many issues. So, the differences of public opinion about different wars can’t simply be chalked up to polarization. In those past wars, there was some justification in that we perceived ourselves fighting a clear enemy who was a clear threat to national security. This wasn’t the case when we invaded Iraq.

Although the difference isn’t polarization in general, maybe it is about specifically polarized opinions about wars of aggression. Liberals and conservatives agree in supporting what are perceived as just wars. Conservatives are more supportive of wars in general, but liberals aren’t. If a war isn’t seen as clearly just, liberal support goes down. This has happened with the Iraq war which was initially perceived as just based on Bush’s lies and then later perceived as unjust (at least by liberals) once the lies were seen for what they were. The Afghanistan war, however, still can be reasonably seen as a just war or seen as having started as a just war.

Most Democrats say the war has not helped keep the U.S. secure (59 percent) while most Republicans say it has (70 percent). Independents split evenly on the question (48 percent has, 48 percent has not).

This demonstrates a difference of worldview. Those on the left believe a war of aggression just leads to more aggression. Those on the right believe that once an enemy has been declared, justly or unjustly, that enemy must be beaten into submission so that they can’t be a further threat.

This change of perception has been driven by the left, who previously claimed that Afghanistan was indeed the only proper war worth fighting:

Although 60 percent of Americans approve of how Obama has handled the situation in Afghanistan, his ratings among liberals have slipped, and majorities of liberals and Democrats alike now, for the first time, solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction in troop levels.

Overall, seven in 10 Democrats say the war has not been worth its costs, and fewer than one in five support an increase in troop levels.

Among the right, the war there is still seen as worth fighting and winning:

Republicans (70 percent say it is worth fighting) and conservatives (58 percent) remain the war’s strongest backers, and the issue provides a rare point of GOP support for Obama’s policies. A narrow majority of conservatives approve of the president’s handling of the war (52 percent), as do more than four in 10 Republicans (43 percent).

Interestingly, as the article states, this is a “rare point of GOP support for Obama’s policies”. And it pits both Obama and the GOP against the left and, I would guess, a Congress which will eventually reflect the constituency against the war that the numbers above show. There’s a reason for that.

That last bit of commentary fits my own analysis. On many issues, Obama’s stated opinions and policies are more in line with Republicans. Assuming Obama is a liberal, he is a very moderate and centrist liberal. Certainly, self-identified liberals take issue with labeling Obama a liberal. Yes, to the rightwinger, Obama is a liberal… but, then again, almost everyone in America is to the left of the far right (by definition).

The first two sets of data show public opinion from 2002. The third set of data is about public opinion during a past war. Interestingly, in both cases, the young are less wary about war (maybe it’s a case of wisdom coming with age). I doubt this youth support of war has anything directly to do with partisan politics. However, the youth opinion of today is essentially the same as the liberal opinion. Like liberals and Democrats in general, today’s youth initially supported both wars and since have had shrinking support, especially for the Iraq war. However, there is other more recent data which I’ve posted elsewhere. Here is the specific quote that caught my attention when looking at the report:

To be sure, Millennials remain the most likely of any generation to self-identify as liberals; they are less supportive than their elders of an assertive national security policy and more supportive of a progressive domestic social agenda. They are still more likely than any other age group to identify as Democrats.

It is interesting that they are the most liberal and most Democratic of any generation. I should clarify the two sets of youth data aren’t entirely comparable. The 2002 data refers to 18-29 year olds which would include both younger GenXers and older Millennials. GenXers are the most Republican of any generation (although younger GenXers are less Republican) and so maybe the 2002 data is too skewed to use as a comparison with the more recent Millenial data.

The liberal demographic (which is one of the youngest demographics) strongly disagrees with and most conservatives (in particular, conservative Republicans) strongly agree with the following:

Opposes lowering defense/military spending in order to reduce deficit

Using military force against countries that may seriously threaten our countrybut have not attacked us

Using military force in Iraq was the right decision

The U.S. militaryeffort in Iraq going fairly well

The interesting thing about the data is that conservative Democrats are more closely aligned with liberals than with conservative Republicans. This could be interpreted in two ways: 1) partisan politics has more effect on public opinion than does the left/right divide; or 2) conservative Democrats are far less conservative than conservative Republicans. I think both are true, but the second interpretation is important because it demonstrates how labels have different meanings in different contexts. Rightwing conservatives wouldn’t consider conservative Democrats as ‘real’ conservatives. So, when I use the term ‘rightwinger’, I’m intentionally making a distinction between the far right and the average American who identifies as conservative. I don’t think conservatives in general are warmongering, but I do think that the data shows far right conservatives (i.e., rightwingers) are more prone to support war. As a related example of this distinction, most Americans identify as conservative and most Americans don’t support torture, but most Southern Evangelicals (i.e., the religious right) do support torture. Another example about attitudes toward violence is that 28% of Republicans (but only 11% of Democrats and 11% of Independents) answered ‘yes’ to the question, “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?” As for the Iraq war, the religious right were the strongest supporters from the beginning (which might be because the president was a born-again who portrayed the War on Terrorism as a holy war).

Washington: Of the major religious groups in the United States, evangelical Christians are the biggest backers of Israel and Washington’s planned war against Iraq, says a new survey released here on 9 October by a politically potent group of fundamentalist Christians and Jews.

Some 69% of conservative Christians favour military action against Baghdad; 10 percentage points more than the US adult population as a whole.

However, it’s not necessarily just the religious right. Republicans in general remain the strongest supporters of Afghanistan despite there being little beneficial results shown for all the money spent and lives lost. Here is from very recent data:

CNN is out with a NEW POLL showing that support among Americans for the war in Afghanistan has declined dramatically in the past two years.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents are opposed to the war, while only 35 percent support it. Interestingly, perhaps even predictably, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats or independents to back the U.S. war effort.

Which brings to mind the extent to which concepts of American patriotism have been influenced — or distorted, in a sense — by Republicans with regard to our country’s military involvement in the so-called War on Terror.

For the past decade, Republicans have tended to think of themselves as more-patriotic-than-thou and have generally been enthusiastic supporters of U.S. military adventurism. They’ve been quick to characterize war dissenters as cut-and-run appeasers, if not cowards or enemy sympathizers.

The article offers some useful context by looking at public opinion over this last century (unfotunately, the graph doesn’t show the party differences):

But it wasn’t always that way. Back in the day, when the GOP was controlled mainly by isolationists, its rank-and-file was often opposed to U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Republicans were against American intervention in World War I (and vehemently opposed Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to create the League of Nation’s at the end of that war). Republicans also were staunchly opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

[…] Nor were Republicans especially hawkish about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In a Gallup poll conducted in June of 1967, a majority of Republican respondents said Vietnam was a mistake, while only one-third of Democrats agreed with them.

Even as American forces were leaving Southeast Asia and communist forces were overrunning Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia, most Republican respondents in a 1975 Gallup poll opposed any further U.S. military aid to the friendly governments in those countries.

Briefly stated, then, Republicans tended to be fairly dovish through much of the 20th century.

That goes back to my original point. It can’t be denied that the GOP today is the war party, but that is far from saying the GOP has always been the war party. Back when the GOP had a leftwing, Republicans were much more weak in their support for war. And, back when the Democratic Party was more conservative, Democrats were much stronger in their support for war. So, support for war can’t be determined merely by partsan identification. The determining factor is whether a particular party is more conservative or more liberal.

– – –

I want to wrap this up with one last issue about confounding factors which I briefly mentioned near the beginning of this post.

Here is one view on the issue of rightwingers. The author, Corey Robin, begins with giving the history of those who first analyzed this ideological phenomenon.

This year is the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. Once this was the most famous of Theodor Adorno’s works. Today it’s largely forgotten. With one exception: its indelible portrait of the “pseudo-conservative.” Although Richard Hofstadter is often credited with the term—his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” appeared in 1955—it was Adorno and his three co-authors who first identified the type: that vengeful and violent citizen who avows his faith in calm and restraint while agitating for policies that “would abolish the very institutions with which he appears to identify himself.” The pseudo-conservative, in other words, is no conservative at all. Prone to “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness,” he loves war and longs for bedlam in the streets. He has “little in common,” in Hofstadter’s words, “with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism.”

He then presents the common distinction between the real conservative and those who supposedly are falsely identifying as conservative.

While the contrast between the true conservative and the pseudo-conservative has been drawn in different ways—the first reads Burke, the second doesn’t read; the first defends ancient liberties, the second derides them; the first seeks to limit government, the second to strengthen it—the distinction often comes down to the question of violence. Where the pseudo-conservative is captivated by war, Sullivan claims that the true conservative “wants peace and is content only with peace.” The true conservative’s endorsements of war, such as they are, are the weariest of concessions to reality. He knows that we live and love in the midst of great evil. That evil must be resisted, sometimes by violent means. All things being equal, he would like to see a world without violence. But all things are not equal, and he is not in the business of seeing the world as he’d like it to be.

For the rest of the article, Robin makes the case for this distinction being false.

The question for us, which Burke neither poses nor answers, is: What kind of political form entails this simultaneity of—or oscillation between—aggrandizement and annihilation? One possibility is hierarchy, with its twin requirements of submission and domination; the other is violence, particularly warfare, with its rigid injunction to kill or be killed. Perhaps not coincidentally, both are of great significance to conservatism as a theoretical tradition and historical practice.

Consistent with Burke’s argument, however, the conservative often favors the latter over the former. Once we are assured of our power over another being, says Burke, it loses its capacity to harm or threaten us. Make a creature useful and obedient, and “you spoil it of every thing sublime.” It becomes an object of contempt, contempt being “the attendant on a strength that is subservient and innoxious.” At least one-half, then, of the experience of hierarchy—the experience of ruling another—is incompatible with, and indeed weakens, the sublime. Confirmed of our power, we are lulled into the same ease and comfort, undergo the same inward melting, that we experience while in the throes of pleasure.

Rule may sometimes be sublime—our power is not always so assured or secure—but violence is more sublime. Most sublime of all is when the two are fused, when violence is performed for the sake of creating, defending, or recovering a regime of domination. But history does not always present such opportunities. The conservative must settle for the lesser good of war, pure and simple. Thus, when Carl Schmitt declares that the fundamental distinction in politics to which all “actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,” he merely formalizes an axiom that had been stirring the conservative mind for more than a century.

That is an attractive argument and I’m partly persuaded by it. I do think there is some truth in it, but I’m not entirely sure it fully or perfectly captures the reality. Bob Altemeyer, in his book The Authoritarians, provides his own definition of a ‘rightwinger’.

Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in theirsociety, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such peoplehave historically been the “proper” authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled,customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically thesefollowers have personalities featuring:
1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities intheir society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.
Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers rightwingauthoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for inOld English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct,doing what the authorities said.

But then qualifies this definition by pointing out that rightwing as a psychological trait isn’t necessarily the same thing as rightwing as a political ideology.

In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, 2 so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.

You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’sFront of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient number snow to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.

Altemeyer clarifies this with research.

As soon as Gorbachev lifted the restraints on doing psychological research in the Soviet Union an acquaintance of mine, Andre Kamenshikov, administered a survey to students at Moscow State University with the same freedom that western researchers take for granted. The students answered the RWA scale and as well a series of questions about who was the “good guy” and who was the “bad guy” in the Cold War. For example, did the USSR start the arms race, or the USA? Would the United States launch a sneak nuclear attack on the Soviet Union if it knew it could do so without retaliation? Would the USSR do that to the United States? Does the Soviet Union have the right to invade a neighbor who looks like it might become allied with the United States? Does the USA have that right when one of its neighbors starts cozying up to the USSR? At the same time Andre was doing his study, I asked the same questions at three different American universities.

We found that in both countries the high RWAs believed their government’sversion of the Cold War more than most people did. Their officials wore the white hats, the authoritarian followers believed, and the other guys were dirty rotten warmongers. And that’s most interesting, because it means the most cock-sure belligerents in the populations on each side of the Cold War, the ones who hated and blamed each other the most, were in fact the same people, psychologically. If they had grown up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they probably would have believed the leaders they presently despised, and despised the leaders they now trusted. They’d have been certain the side they presently thought was in the right was in the wrong, and instead embraced the beliefs they currently held in contempt.

Based on the research, several things relevant to this post can be concluded about Right-Wing Authoritarians (RWAs):

1) RWAs support/promote violence and war.

[…] high RWAs tend to make an ambiguous situation dangerous […] are likely to turn a secure situation into a dangerous one.

2) RWAs aren’t well informed (which relates to their higher rates of hypocrisy).

Dunwoody, Plane, Rice and Rothrock thus found that as late as August 2005 andJanuary 2006 high RWA Pennsylvania college students were likely to have inaccurateperceptions of the war in Iraq in all the areas tested. They believed Iraq had usedchemical or biological weapons against American troops, that Iraq’s government washighly connected with al-Qaida, that Americans had found evidence in Iraq thatSaddam was working closely with al-Qaida, that most people in the world favored theUnited States’ going to war in Iraq, and so did most people in Europe. They alsobelieved that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but this wasonly statistically significant at the .09 level. In general the students were betterinformed than the American public as a whole, but the authoritarian followers amongthem still carried a lot of demonstrably erroneous beliefs around in their heads.

David Winters of the University of Michigan found in 2005 that the high RWAs in a largesample of university students believed the invasion of Iraq constituted a just war. They thoughtthe danger posed by Iraq was so great, the United States had no other choice. They thought theinvasion occurred only as a last resort, after all peaceful alternatives had been exhausted, and thatthe war would bring about more good than evil. They rejected the notion that the failure to findweapons of mass destruction showed the “pre-emptive” attack had not been necessary for selfdefense.They also rejected the suggestion that the war was conducted to control oil supplies andextend American power, or as an act of revenge. And they still believed that Saddam had beeninvolved in the 9/11 attacks.

4) RWAs, at least in the North American population, have weak correlation to fiscal conservatism and strong correlation to social conservatism.

RWA scale scores correlated highest with attitudes against samesexmarriage, abortion, drugs, pornography, women’s equality, unconventionalbehavior and free speech, and with support for the Patriot Act and America’s “right”to spread democracy by military force. In contrast, the relationships with economicissues (taxation, minimum wage, the public versus private sector, free trade) proved much weaker. The data thus indicate, as do a lot of other findings, that high RWAs are“social conservatives” to a much greater extent that they are “economic conservatives.”

To give more context in American politics, here is an excerpt from another book (Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by Hetherington and Weiler):

Those who score high in authoritarianism tend to have a different cognitive style than those who score low. The former tend to view the world in more concrete, black and white terms (Altemeyer 2996; Stenner zoos). This is probably because they have a greater than average need for order. In contrast, those who score lower in authoritarianism have more comfort with ambiguous shades of gray, which allow for more nuanced judgments.

Perhaps because of these cognitive differences, people who are more authoritarian make stronger than average distinctions between in-groups – the groups they identify with – and out-groups – groups that they perceive challenge them. Such a tendency has the effect of imposing order and minimizing ambiguity. In addition, those who are more authoritarian embrace and work to protect existing social norms (Feldman zoo3). These conventions are time-tested in their ability to maintain order. Altering norms could result in unpredictable changes with undesirable consequences.

Since the more authoritarian view the social order as fragile and under attack (Altemeyer 1996), they tend to feel negatively about, behave aggressively toward, and be intolerant of those whom they perceive violate time-honored norms or fail to adhere to established social conventions (Stenner zoo5). Specifically, scholars have shown a strong relationship between authoritarianism and negative affect toward many minority groups. Over the past fifty years, these groups have included Jews (Adorno et al. 1950; but see Raden 1999), African Americans (Sniderman and Piazza 1993), gays (Barker and Tinnick zoo6), and Arabs after September ii (Huddy et al. zoo5).6

Authoritarianism is a particularly attractive explanation for changes in contemporary American politics because it structures opinions about both domestic and foreign policy issues. In addition to having concerns about racial difference and social change, those who are more authoritarian tend to prefer more muscular responses to threats than those who are less. A proverbial punch to the mouth of an adversary results in a less ambiguous outcome than, say, negotiation or diplomacy. Not surprisingly, scholars have consistently drawn links between authoritarianism and a hawkish attitude toward foreign policy and resolution of conflict (Lipset 11959; Eckhardt and Newcombe 11969; Altemeyer 11996; Perrin zoos). Those scoring high in authoritarianism were also more likely than those scoring low to support military action after the September 1111 terrorist attacks (Huddy et al. zoos). Viewed as a whole, research on authoritarianism suggests that the same disposition that might dispose people to be anti-black or anti-gay might also dispose them to favor military conflict over diplomacy and protecting security over preserving civil liberties. A preference for order and a need to minimize ambiguity connects both impulses.

The events from another time in history provide suggestive evidence that the same disposition motivates both. Particularly in the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy set his sights not only on rooting communist elements out of the State Department and other government agencies. He also focused his attention, for a time, on purging homosexuals. McCarthy pointed to supposed links between communism and homosexuality, and his speeches often made passing reference to “Communists and queers” (Johnson zoo4). Other conservative senators, including Styles Bridges, Kenneth Wherry, and Clyde Hoey, pressed the issue of homosexuality along with communism during the Red Scare as well.

All this suggests that preferences about many of the new issues on the American political agenda, such as gay rights, the war in Iraq, the proper response to terrorism, and immigration are likely structured by authoritarianism. These are all potentially divisive topics, characterized by deeply held, gut-level views. Although contemporary American politics is perhaps not polarized in a strict definitional sense, insofar as preferences are not increasing number of salient issues are structured by a deeply felt worldview, specifically authoritarianism.

– – –

In conclusion:

1) The Republican Party is presently associated with rightwing politics (social conservatism), but it wasn’t always.

2) Social conservatism in the US is presently correlated with Right-Wing Authoritarianism, but this correlation is partly culture dependent.

3) Right-Wing Authoritarianism has been shown in research to include a predisposition to supporting of violence and war.

Let me return to my original comment:

“I always wonder why rightwingers love war so much. Looking﻿ past all the patriotic propaganda, destroyed lives is the reality of war. But once the soldiers come home all the lovers of war suddenly stop caring.”

Have I proven this to be true? Have I at least provided enough supporting evidence?

I think I have. I haven’t necessarily explained why Right-Wing Authoritarians are the way they are, but I have provided the correlations for how Right-Wing Authoritarian attitudes play out in American politics.

If one wishes to say that this has little to do with real conservatism, I’m fine with that. I honestly admit to not being sure what true conservatism might be. The people I consider true conservatives (or, at least, respectable and reasonable conservatives) are people like John W. Dean and Meghan McCain who vocally criticize the radical rightwingers who have taken over the conservative movement. I’d love to see some other version of conservatism to take the place of the present radical rightwingers.